


10-4

by gendzl



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Jewish Character, Love Confessions, M/M, Medical Inaccuracies, Minor Character Death, Mutual Pining, Reminiscing, The Power Of True Love And Stubbornness Keeps Local Man Alive And Running, blatant abuse of parenthetical asides, but it's a mckirk fic of course there's discussions of vomit, kinda graphic discussions of vomit for a few paragraphs sorry, uhhh what else, vomit is what bwings us togevva today, we're also playing it fast and loose with the physical limitations of the human body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:01:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21807100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendzl/pseuds/gendzl
Summary: Three years into their five-year mission and Leo is stranded on a planet he shouldn't have stepped foot on to begin with. He's unable to beam out, because the ship can't find him, because the alien planet's dense foliage turned out to be both a signal death trap anda literal actual death trap. He'd broken his communicator before the mission even started (damn it, Jim), and can only receive messages.Until the Enterprise rescues him or the planet succeeds in killing him, he can only listen to Jim's voice.And run.There's a lot of running.
Relationships: James T. Kirk/Leonard "Bones" McCoy
Comments: 16
Kudos: 178





	10-4

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Mixed Signals](https://archiveofourown.org/works/789042) by [Mijan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mijan/pseuds/Mijan). 



> 10-4 is radio shorthand meaning "message received".

Leo wasn't even supposed to be on the blasted planet in the first place. Jim had—well, been _Jim_.

The planet was almost entirely rainforest, and they'd landed him with two others (both redshirts) in one of the only gaps in the canopy. It ought to have been a simple, low risk mission—the planet was unoccupied by any sentient life forms, which was the only reason that grumpy Leonard "diplomatic disaster waiting to happen" McCoy had been sent down. They'd thought it was safe.

Jim wouldn't have sent anyone at all, except that the botanists believed the plants might yield some interesting data, judging by some gibberish indicated by another gibberish and—well, Leo obviously hadn’t been listening. He'd start to care if they found the cure for the common cold in one of these plants.

Their little troupe no way of knowing that the forest…shifted. The Enterprise hadn't been in orbit long enough for their sensors to pick up on a shift before they sent everyone down.

So for five hours, he and three others trudged peacefully through foreign vegetation beneath a canopy so high above their heads they couldn't see the top, collecting samples in sturdy glass vials that clinked quietly against the rest of their gear.

It had been _fine_. They'd wandered through the forest in a tight circle around their landing point, never more than 20 yards from open air. The transporter couldn't lock onto them through the canopy, so they would have to move back into the clearing in order to leave. They'd known that much, at least, going in.

* * *

His communicator had gone on the fritz the moment he set foot on the planet—he could hear transmissions from the ship, but they were unable to make out any of his responses. It wasn't supposed to be a problem, only an inconvenience:

"Enterprise to McCoy," his communicator announced. Leo grimaced. "Scotty's people think something is loose in your communicator, probably from last week with the, uh, incident on the bridge. They think it's weakened the signal, and combined with the canopy above you, you won't be able to talk to us for the duration of your time on this planet. The captain says to tell you he's sorry."

Leo didn't recognize the voice, but he didn't need to. He grabbed one of the redshirts by the collar and slapped his own hand against their communicator with far more force than necessary. He could feel bad about it later. "You can tell the _captain_ that it's his fault I’m even on this damn planet, and it's his fault my communicator is broken, and he's going to owe me for the rest of his _very short life."_

His communicator beeped again. "Enterprise to Bones." Jim. "I'm still on shift. I can hear you."

"Good,'" he snarled back. "This is entirely your fault."

"Bones, I—"

"Who else would have bet their Chief Medical Officer in a poker game, Jim? And then _lost_?"

There was a brief pause during which Leo imagined money exchanging hands on the bridge. There had been a lot of speculation as to just why he was being sent down planetside.

"Okay, that's fair, but I really—"

"Can it, Jim. We'll talk when I’m back." Oh, would they talk. He shoved the communicator (and the redshirt to which it was attached, Christ, he really needed to learn their names) away and turned to keep walking through the dense, damp undergrowth.

"Bones, I'm sorry, okay, I just—"

It was then that all hell broke loose.

* * *

It began as a rumbling: a deep groan from the center of the planet.

The shaking came next. _Earthquake_ , they thought at first.

And then the ground opened up beneath them, and the trees sank rapidly beneath the ground, and Leo, who had been standing in a minuscule patch of sunlight—drawn to it like a cat to a warm patch of floor—blinked twice and found himself standing in a new section of forest without having moved an inch.

The redshirts were gone.

* * *

Leo spent the next hour running in ever-widening circles around where he'd been standing, verifying what he already knew: the clearing had disappeared, replaced by endless rainforest.

* * *

Leo wasn't one for denial. He knew himself inside and out. And at the very foundation of who he was—intertwined with his fierce stubbornness and that relentless yearning for _home_ —he knew that he was just a man in desperate, pathetic love with his captain.

He knew that he wouldn't give up until he was back on the Enterprise with the chance to tell Jim that. Come hell or high water, he was making it off this planet.

Okay, so maybe he _was_ one for denial. He knew that his chances were slim and would only get slimmer.

Whatever.

Hard place, meet Leonard McCoy.

He got to his feet and began the search for another clearing.

* * *

"They can't get the math to work out yet, Bones. Calculating the odds of a clearing turning up near you won't happen until we have a chance to observe more of the earthquakes. In the meantime, I'd argue that your odds are better if you stay put, but that's just instinct, not science, and I'm not the one who's down there. Follow your own gut.

"We don’t even know if any of you are still _alive_. There aren't any signals coming off the planet anymore; not since the clearing moved. Something about it fucked with our instruments and we can't get any readings to settle. We won't stop trying, though. I ordered Uhura to cut off all communication from outside the Enterprise—I'm not going to risk anyone ordering me to leave you behind before I'm sure we've tried everything. I'm not leaving you, Bones. I won't do it."

* * *

"Uhura is telling me to keep talking to you—regular conversation, not just mission updates. Like you're a coma patient and I'm the spouse she's trying to con into hope with an old wives tale."

"Most coma patients _can_ hear you, Jim. I've told you this before and you know it," he said in reply, tapping his communicator out of habit.

"They're not sure exactly what's wrong with your comm, so we can't tell you how to fix it, on the off-chance you can even hear me right now. Scotty says that the earthquake shift thing could have done even more damage to it than we did last week. Nobody knows what's happening, Bones, but I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Shit."

Twenty minutes passed in silence before Jim said, quietly, "I never would have sent you out there if I'd known."

"I know, Jim."

* * *

Leo was sick of looking at this planet. Populated only by plant life, everything was just…greenish. All of it. The vegetation was so dense that he couldn't even see the dull red of the dirt unless he made an effort. And he was much too tired to make an effort.

Most of what he could see was that soft sort of frost-covered sage green color, like the lambs-ear plant from Earth, although bulbous and far more alien. There was a soft blue moss covering most of the forest floor—the kind of blue that he might have liked if it hadn't been so goddamned endless.

The clearing wasn't blue. The clearing was dull, red dirt, dry yellow grass, and the natural yellow light from the star this planet orbited—not the green light that filtered in through the forest canopy.

Green green green green green.

God, but he was hungry.

It was initially going to be a 14-hour mission. He'd now been on the planet for 26, and hadn't eaten nearly enough to make up for all of the running.

The ground had rumbled nearby—forcing him to run for his life, because he knew that the first time was nothing but a lucky accident, and the next time (and the time after that, and the time after _that)_ he wouldn't be standing in a patch of sunlight (there were so few of them) and he'd get pulled under by the treetops like the redshirts whose names he might never learn (names he'd be sure to learn if he ever got back)—exactly five times, without any discernible pattern. Once, he'd hardly caught his breath before the forest started shaking again.

He was alone on an empty planet, and he was hungry (but not thirsty, because at least this had happened on a rainforest planet, small blessings), and his muscles were sore from being on edge and awake and _running_ for so long, and—

And Jim was still talking to him.

He'd taken Uhura's suggestion to heart, and thank God he had. Leo was honestly starting to think that Jim's voice was the only thing still keeping him alive. Certainly, it was all that kept him awake and moving. And here? That meant the same thing. He couldn't be sure, if he fell asleep, that he would wake up in time to run. He hoped he wasn't going to be here long enough that he'd be forced to find out.

"Most everyone here is doing fine, you know. I’m…not." Leo's tired ears perked up a bit at that. Jim was as exhausted as Leo, but he hadn't slept yet either.

And Jim always said interesting things when he was tired.

"I'm really not fine, Bones."

Jim sighed. "The rest of them—I mean, we all like your grumpy ass, McCoy, don't you ever think we don't—but to them, you're just…their doctor. You're CMO, and you're important, and unique, but you're also ultimately replaceable. Anyone else could step in to do the work you've been doing, and none of the rest of them would feel like this.

"I hate it. It feels like right after Tarsus IV again, except—"

He waited for Jim to continue speaking, one weather eye on the forest floor. Hell, he hoped he wouldn't have to run anytime soon. He needed rest, certainly, but more than that, he needed to hear whatever it was that Jim would say next.

It took Jim several long moments to gather his thoughts, and Leo could almost see him standing in his quarters, drawing his hands down over his face and then gesturing through the air with them as he spoke.

"It's like…I know I'm here, and I know that I'm okay, but my lungs still aren't working. Some part of me is starving because you're gone. I'm not okay, Bones, and I swear to God, once we get you back on this ship, you're never leaving it again. You're my—my best friend, and you're the _least_ replaceable part of the Enterprise. I'd park her in dead space and leave her to scavengers if it would only get you back. Fuck, you're my _family_. They could strip her to down to the frame and sell her off piece by piece for all I care. I just need you."

And Leo could only stare up at the canopy and think, _That's what love is, Jim._

* * *

"I used to be a sympathy vomiter," Jim said at one point, long after Leo had lost track of time. "Sam got sick a lot when we were kids, and it was like dominoes, you know? He'd start making that awful suppressed hiccup sound like a cat with a hairball and our mom would practically break the laws of physics trying to get a bowl under each of us before we ralphed, one after the other like our stomachs were joined.

"You cured me of that. Puking in my lap—talk about exposure therapy. I couldn't get out of my seat for three hours, and I'm pretty sure Pike had ordered everybody to let me stew in my own hangover if I showed up for the flight, so I just sat there with a sticky puddle of cheap booze and whatever the hell you'd eaten before the flight—" Lasagna. It had been lasagna, and Leo maintained that it was food poisoning rather than aviophobia that'd led him to vomit in the first place. He'd like that on record. "— _in my lap_ , and, God, Bones. The _smell_. Ugh.

"Anyway. Uhura got sick last year when the replicators malfunctioned, remember that? And my stomach didn't even twinge in sympathy. So thanks, I guess." Jim sighed heavily. "I never wanna go through that again, though. Got it? This isn't permission for you to puke on me when you get home. That was disgusting."

* * *

"I'd hate to think that the last time I heard your voice, you were angry with me."

Jim didn't speak again for a long time.

* * *

"I always kind of wanted a cat. You grew up on a farm, right? I wonder if you ever had a barn cat. I bet you did."

He didn't. Leo's grandparents had been allergic, and they'd never had much of a problem with mice, either. In fact, the closest thing he'd had to any kind of indoor pet was the garter snake he'd found in his boot one morning when he went out to feed the horses. He'd woken everyone up with his screaming.

"I bet she showed up at the edge of the property one day and you used your big sad eyes to talk them into letting you keep her. Shit, Bones, why don't we ever talk about this crap? I know everything there is to know about you and your life now, but hardly anything about whatever the hell came before. We get you back, and we'll spend a few nights reminiscing even if I have to sit on you to make it happen."

A pause. "I don't know. I've told you everything, but…huh. Do you not trust me? Is that why we don't talk about your stuff?"

Leo's heart clenched. He hadn't even realized that Jim still _wanted_ to hear his 'stuff'. The few times Jim had asked, back in the beginning, Leo had been so homesick (for his past, his family, and even the blue marble of a planet they left behind) or just plain raw (he sometimes felt like his ex had scraped his heart out with a rusty grapefruit spoon) that he'd brushed him off.

Jim had eventually stopped asking, respecting the boundary Leo put up (and shouldn't that have told Leo right then, the kind of man Jim was?) and every time since that Leo had considered talking, he'd immediately _re_ considered. Emotional vulnerability came at a higher cost on a mission as long as theirs; mistakes lingered longer when you couldn't air them out with some distance. It was easier, he thought, to simply tamp down the impulse to talk. To keep everyone—to keep _Jim_ —at arm's length.

Shows how much he knew. Now he might never get the chance.

"Fuck, I've gotta get some sleep. I can't keep talking to dead air. Computer, wake me when—" Jim’s voice cut off, and Leo was alone.

He was alone for five hours, and he'd run once more from the twisting motions of this planet that didn't know any other way of being, and he was far too close to sleep (can't sleep, sleep means he doesn't feel the tremors, sleep means death, sleep means Jim will never know what he means to Leo) when the communicator on his chest crackled to life and Jim's voice came back in his ears.

* * *

Leo did fall asleep once—physically couldn't keep his eyes open, couldn't prevent his knees from buckling down onto the damp moss beneath his feet—and woke up to 1) a leg cramp unlike any he'd ever experienced, and 2) Jim saying "I love you."

Of course he'd pick the worst possible moment to tell Leo that. Jim wasn't just _not_ within pulling-him-in-by-the-collar-of-his-shirt distance, but Leo was in so much physical pain that the emotional weight of it hardly even registered.

Sure, the words sat on his chest so hard they hurt, and they kind of made him want to die a little bit, but there was a worse, far more immediate pain to deal with.

By the time the cramp eased, Leo was wide awake again, lying flat on the ground, eyeing the ceaseless green above his head with as much ire as he could muster.

He slapped his communicator uselessly. "I love you too, Jim." They were the first words he'd spoken in what felt like years, and they were certainly the only ones that had ever mattered.

The trees around him groaned, and he eased his way once more onto aching feet.

* * *

It was the middle of the night on this planet, but nearing sunset back on Earth where the Enterprise had first launched.

Leo only knew this because the next time that Jim's voice broke the silence, it was to light Shabbat candles.

"I've gotta get back to the bridge in a minute," he said quietly. "But I know you wouldn't want me to skip out on this just because you're missing."

Leo let the familiar cadence of the blessing roll over him as he stumbled to a stop and leaned against the trunk of a tree. He had spent almost every Shabbat evening (barring actual life-or-death emergencies) for the last three years with Jim, standing beside him as he lit the candles in his quarters even when it was inconvenient. _Traditions are important_ , Leo told him the first time Jim had looked from a mess to his watch and hesitated. _I'll do this with you, if you want._

_We can make time for this._

Jim murmured a soft "Shabbat shalom" into the darkness and Leo expected that to be it. The whole crew was busy pulling double and even triple shifts trying to work out a way to get him home. Jim himself hadn't slept much more than Leo had. Surely Jim wouldn't still take the time to— 

Not just because he—

[Jim started to sing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8aOuKA12Bc&feature=youtu.be&t=5), and something deep down inside of Leo _cracked_.

He'd never loved anyone like this.

* * *

"—fuck you, you fucking fuck," Jim finished, laughing. "I read that on a t-shirt once."

 _You_ owned _that t-shirt once, come on,_ Leo thought to himself as he ducked under yet another pale green leaf.

"Okay, fine, I _owned_ that t-shirt once."

He dredged up a smile and tried to up his faltering pace.

* * *

Things were going to be different, Leo decided, when he got back to the ship. He was going to turn up at the required psychiatric check-ups he'd spent the last three years dodging, and he was going to actually start to deal with the mountain of baggage that the last few decades of his life had left him carrying. He was going to turn over about eight new leaves at once, and he was going to stick with them, god damn it, and he was going to try and make a go of this thing with Jim even if it ended in total disaster, because Jim was worth making a fool of himself for, and he—he was—he was gonna—

Sleep.

He was gonna sleep _so fucking much_ when this was over.

The ground shook.

He didn't know how much more he could take.

* * *

"Good morning! I have a good feeling about today, Bones. The boys have been working on something special for you. It's kind of risky, but we're gonna try it in a few minutes anyway. Just hang on a little longer, okay? We're coming to get you."

"That's great, Jim, but if this doesn't work, then I'm pretty sure I'm dead." Leo was on his back in the forest and he loved Jim but he couldn't do this anymore, he couldn't keep up the relentless pace required of him, and he was as good as finished, and—the light was different.

The light was different?

 _No longer green_ , some corner of his mind realized. Was that _purple_? What the hell?

The tremors started then, but they were slower, and the sound that emerged from the plants surrounding him was deeper, almost deliberate.

"We're coming," Jim said then. "Don't move, we're coming. If you can hear us, we've got you, Bones. It's us. _We're coming."_

The light was still purple.

He watched in exhausted awe as the ground opened around him in slow motion. He was on a stable piece of moss-covered land. The trees sank into the planet almost leisurely, bending away from him as they did.

It was a very good thing he didn't have to move, because he wouldn't have been able to if he tried.

The ground rearranged itself, joining back together seamlessly. Moss was replaced by shards of dry grass, and the dirt under his hands was red and he didn't even have to dig for it. He'd be willing to bet that the sunlight would be yellow if it weren't so persistently purple.

He blinked, eyes closing for far longer than they should have. He was so tired. He dragged his lids open again. Purple.

Eyes closed. Black.

Open. Purple.

Black.

Pur—no.

He was in the transporter room.

_Jim._

"I've got you, Bones."

He met oblivion with bitter relief.

* * *

Leo registered that he was in sickbay the moment he regained consciousness. His eyes were too heavy to open, but he'd recognize the steady hum of his medical equipment anywhere, even trussed up in itchy bedding and more than three quarters dead. Combined with the soft mutterings of Christine in the other room and the familiar sound of Jim's snoring at his elbow, and there was only one place he could be.

He toppled back into sleep.

* * *

Jim's boots were on the bed beside his pillow. His feet were in them—Jim hadn't just decided to set his boots there. Leo could see the loose stitching on the worn out soles and recognized them as the pair he'd threatened to throw out an airlock if Jim didn't send them in for repair. That had been a year ago now.

"You're gonna slip and break your neck in those things," he said.

 _Tried_ to say. What came out was something closer to a rasp of vowels.

Ha. A rasp of vowels. Was that like a murder of crows?

…Leo acknowledged that perhaps he wasn't firing on all cylinders quite yet.

"Wha—" The boots moved. Jim's feet dropped down to the floor and his head lifted off the chair that—by the looks of it—he'd appropriated from Leo's office. "Hey! You're awake!"

Leo lifted a few fingers in agreement rather than trying to speak again.

"You've been out for a while. I was starting to get worried, but Christine said it was normal. You were…hell, Bones, you almost died." He seemed horrified by the thought.

Something indefinably _mushy_ in Leo's chest simultaneously uncoiled and knotted itself tighter at that realization.

Or whatever.

Leo glared at Jim, trying to communicate his need for water with the power of his thoughts.

Jim just stared back at him. "Uh."

Oh, fuck it.

He closed his eyes and fell back to sleep. He could get water later.

* * *

He was in so much pain.

He hadn't thought a body could _hold_ this much pain. He wouldn't have believed there was room for it all.

He slapped a hand around blindly until he found the button that delivered sweet relief into his veins, and he sighed.

"Hey Bones. You with us?"

He creaked an eye open. Jim was grinning at him from his chair.

He passed Leo a glass of water from the nightstand and said, "I can't tell you how glad I am that I didn’t have to say the mourner's Kaddish for you. I'm not even sure I'd have been able to remember it."

Throat no longer a desert, Leo said, "I think it's the one that rhymes."

"They all rhyme, Bones." His face softened. "Thanks for not dying on me."

"Anytime."

They sat in a shared weary silence for a time, each of them relishing in the simple relief of the other's presence.

When he finally asked a good while later, it was without much hope: "The redshirts?"

Jim shook his head. "Gone. You were the only sentient life form on the planet, Bones. We checked." He looked at Leo with a mixture of sorrow and guilty relief (it shouldn't have been anyone, but it wasn't you, it wasn't you, _thank God_ it wasn't you).

* * *

"You haven't been back up to the bridge since you found me," Leo said the next afternoon.

Jim had taken up sentry duty beside his bed. He left only for short chunks of time, to retrieve decent food for them both or to give stern "fuck off" orders out in the hallway to whomever Spock sent to request the captain's presence.

Jim tensed in his seat, arms coming up to cross over his chest. "They’re doing just fine without me."

"I'm not more important than the ship, Jim," Leo said gently. "Your job is—"

"Yeah? Fuck my job. My job can wait until you're well enough to do _your_ job."

Leo gestured at the bed he had no designs on leaving. "I might be getting better, but I'm not going anywhere. You can pull a shift or two with me still in here."

He watched as Jim gritted his teeth. His boots—those thrice-damned boots—squeaked as he planted his feet more firmly against the tile floor. _Stubborn ass._

"It can wait," was all he said.

Leo sighed and adjusted the blanket around his hips. "Fine." At least with him there, he wouldn't be worried about Jim falling off his boots and bashing his head on something while he wasn't well enough to fix him.

* * *

Leo had planned to wait a few days before bringing up the whole "so you're in love with me" thing. He needed time for the persistent leg cramps to cease, and to ensure that he'd built up enough strength to pin Jim down if he tried to run away from his feelings.

It wasn't at all that he was delaying the confrontation of his own feelings. Nope. No way. Eight new leaves, remember? He was sticking with it.

It was just…yeah, okay, he was scared. He kept wussing out. Whatever.

But in the end it didn't matter, because Jim got there first—over Jell-O, three days after they'd rescued Leo from hell.

"I had Scotty take a look at your communicator this morning," he said, about a mile to the left of casual.

Leo set his spoon down before the gelatin tremors could give him away. "Oh yeah?"

"Yup. It was a quick fix—just a loose wire in back from when you chucked it at me." Jim spooned more of the electric blue goop into his mouth before he added, "He also said you almost definitely heard everything we were saying to you while you were down there."

Leo grimaced, and then thought, _Fuck it. New leaves!_ He could take the metaphorical bull by the metaphorical horns. The cat by its scruff. The—okay, he was still dawdling. Enough.

He took a single, steadying breath, and said quite simply, "I love you."

Jim, having abandoned his spoon in favor of tipping the entire plastic container over his face to suck down the remainder of his Jell-O (in an imitation of nonchalance that fooled absolutely no one), came very close to aspirating it. _"Fuck._ Seriously?"

Leo liked to think that the casual air he adopted was much more convincing than Jim's. "You betcha, sweetheart."

* * *

"Hey, psssst. Bones. Wake up."

"Hnnnnnngh."

"Do you think we could sneak a cat on board?"

Leo groaned in exasperation, punching his pillow down and turning his head to look at the vague Jim-shaped shadow in bed beside him. "You're the captain, Jim. If you want a damn cat, you can just get a damn cat," he mumbled back.

Jim hummed. "Where's the fun in that, though?"

He didn't dignify him with a response, but he privately bet himself that there would be a cat in their quarters before the month was out.

* * *

It only took a week.


End file.
